


L(adies) L(ove) Cool J(umps)

by Casylum



Series: Borkage 2018 [3]
Category: Original Work, Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-16
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2019-04-23 14:09:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14334123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casylum/pseuds/Casylum
Summary: "They want you to do pairs with Baryshnikova—""Excuse me?""It's good for morale.""Whose morale?" Kadriye asks, pushing through the front doors, "The Americans?"





	L(adies) L(ove) Cool J(umps)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mlraven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mlraven/gifts).



It's January, and her short program for Worlds is Wagner, with some tinkling French thing for the long. Kadriye doesn't know the names of the songs, and doesn't want to; her coaches picked them, and she'll end up hating them by the end of the season regardless of what they’re called. 

She's one of the last to have an all-wordless line-up, a standout in an increasingly lyric-saturated norm. In contrast to the other two, though, her music for the free is something incongruously modern, which is why she's currently banging out triple-Axel/triple-toe combos to the heavy bass of an electric guitar instead of the delicate thrum of a full orchestra.

Halfway through her step sequence, she catches a glimpse of Yulia Baryshnikova, and has a little mental wobble. Baryshnikova is Russian, fresh off of a gold at last year’s World Juniors, and her line-up, from what Kadriye remembers, is still struggling to figure out what to do with itself, now that backloading six triples doesn’t guarantee a win. She'd gone out in the group ahead of Kadriye, and was currently on track to just miss the podium by inches, so long as the Italian and Japanese competitors don't do something dramatic, like forget how to breathe on the ice.

 _Not bad for her senior debut_ , Kadriye thinks, and then fucking aces her triple-loop/single-toe/triple-Salchow combo at the far side of the rink, right in front of the kiss-and-cry. _Not bad at all_.

~

Her coach finds her again after the podium, the weight of the gold still hanging around her neck.

"So," she says, falling in next to her as they walk towards the shuttle bus that will take them back to the hotel, "they want you to do the exhibition skate at the Grand Prix Final."

Kadriye nods, not sure what her coach is getting at. She's always done the exhibition, when they've let her; it’s one of her favorite parts of competition season.

Her coach clears her throat. "Um."

"What?" Kadriye narrows her eyes. "What? Did the IOC change the scoring again? Has the COC decided I can't compete for Team Canada this go-round? Has my mother sent in another headscarf that I can't possibly wear because it doesn't match my costume but you're too polite to refuse it? What?"

"Well," her coach says, drawing out the sound, "they want you to do pairs—"

"Excuse me?"

"—with Baryshnikova—"

"Excuse me?"

"—they're pairing up everyone—"

"And what, they ran out of men?"

"Yes, actually, I'm so glad you brought that up yourself—"

"Or did they just count me as a man because I only wear pants on the ice?"

Her coach ignores that. "They've given you time to put together a routine—you'll both be in the same cities for the next few months, everyone else is being put through this shit, and besides, it's good for morale."

"Whose morale?" Kadriye asks, pushing through the front doors, "The Americans’?"

"The Americans are skating with the Chinese, so who knows," her coach says, then changes tactics. "It would look good, at home. International cooperation."

Kadriye snorts with the derision particular to the citizens of the former Soviet-bloc states. She may not have been to Georgia since her parents moved the family to Ottawa when she was six, but she knows better than to trust the goodwill of Russia.

Her coach rolls her eyes. "Fine, fine, it would be good for you, to skate with Baryshnikova.”

“Good for me,” Kadriye says flatly. “Sure.”

“That’s right,” her coach says, “Good for you. You said it before we came here: you're in a rut, and need a change. Doing pairs, even just for an exhibition, is a change. It’ll shake things up, get you thinking, make you work.

“And,” her coach adds, almost as an afterthought, “good for her, mostly because you haven't been dropping triple after triple in the back-half for the whole of your career."

"So we're helping the Russians," Kadriye points out.

Her coach flaps a hand. "That's irrelevant."

Kadriye sighs. "I assume the COC has already agreed to this?"

"The COC fucking loves this," her coach says, then gets the sly look in her eye that Kadriye has never trusted, not at six a.m. practices, and certainly not here, in the middle of an ambush. "And, I hear Baryshnikova has been wanting to meet you. Who knows, maybe you'll make—" her voice drops suggestively "—a _friend_."

"Ugh," Kadriye says, and gets on the bus.

~

Two weeks later, she's regretting everything she's ever done to bring herself to this point.

Baryshnikova—Yulia, she'd been told, call me Yulia—is doing circles at center ice, adding flairs as she passes in front of where the judges would sit. Her coach, a diminutive Russian woman who'd medalled in three separate Olympics, and Kadriye's coach are standing at the boards, very politely insulting their individual coaching styles, their fashion sense, their musical preferences, and each other

"Well," Kadriye says, skating over to join Yulia, "this is going...well."

Yulia cocks an eyebrow. "This is well?"

"Just think," Kadriye says, eyeing their respective coaches, watching for signs they might actually move to hitting each other, "they could be the ones wearing knife shoes."

Yulia stifles a grin, puts in a bit of a spin. "Then we would have been able to leave much, much sooner, I think, because they would have killed each other much faster than this...slow denigration."

 _Slow denigration_ , Kadriye mouths as she circles away from Yulia, and shakes her head. They've barely started working on the exhibition routine—see: two coaches and one imminent bare-knuckle brawl—but over the last week-and-a-half of work, Kadriye's come to like Yulia. She's got a dry wit, patience, an unselfconscious willingness to try anything on the ice, and a sharp eye for good scarf material. The last would, honestly, be enough, but the first three tip her right over the scale.

"So," Kadriye says, looping around again to face Yulia, "do you want to try the death spiral again, or do you think it's too on the nose?"

Yulia laughs, holds out a hand. "Oh, what does it matter? You haven't dropped me yet."

 _And I don't mean to_ , Kadriye thinks, and takes it.

**Author's Note:**

> have a treat!
> 
> And then they do the exhibition skate, revolutionize the world of pairs skating, and eventually fall in love. The Chu-Ouellettes are officiants at their wedding, because of course every ice lady knows all the other ice ladies, and everyone lives happily ever after the end. 
> 
> Everything I know about figure skating I learned from watching the Olympics and reading Wikipedia articles. The jumps are real, Worlds is a thing, their coaches are based off of real, current lady skaters (guess who), the routines are imaginary, and Kadriye is skating to Ramin Djawadi's "Pacific Rim/Mako" for her Free Program. 
> 
> Don't ask me what the Wagner is, I don't know either.


End file.
